By digging through many layers of these foruum posts and replies, I came across You need to reclaim your server, but don't dare to touch the Windows Registry
Method 1 changed some stuf, and it looked like the issue might be resolved and things were happening, but everything was super slow, taking forever to load until eventually when I refreshed the page and it gave me some sort of error and then said plex was unavailable. Trying to access again directly from the system tray icon ended up back at the same “Not authorized” page. Then I tried Method 2 and that solved the the problem. I was able to rebuild a new server and everything seems to be working fine now.
Not sure why this worked when deleting the same entries in the registry didn’t work. Not sure why this worked when deleting the whole Plex section in the registrey along with the local appdata folder, uninstalling, restaring the pc, and reinstalling Plex media server didn’t work.
I do thank you for the help, I really appreciate it. However I feel that a normal end user shouldn’t have to deal with problems like this, shouldn’t have to jump through so many hoops to try to fix it, shouldn’t have to scour through countless disorganized forum posts and just keep trying everything they see trial and error style.
Again, appreciate the help, but surely you understand the frustration.
